[Image: Dakhla camp for Sahrawi refugees in the Tindouf region of Algeria in 1998, UNHCR/A. Hollmann]

It is the architectural space of urban dislocation. Expelled space. A scattered no man's land buffering the first world from the rest of the world. Swollen fractions, a violent terrestrial palette, criss-crossing boundaries, impregnated landscapes and disease. It is a haunted edge space that laps at the periphery of earth's gated Eden.

[Of course, I really don't know what I am talking about, or exactly what it is even I am trying to say, but...]

These contexts of posturban mobility, sort of, stratify a geospatial complicity for a whole spectrum of forced migrations and evictions. In the examples given above, familiar notions of eviction and immigration are challenged and redefined. Homeless people can no longer be seen as waifs who simply refuse to work. Day laborers are no longer just some group of hard workers from across the border eager to make an extra buck. The riots that recently rocked Paris can't be reduced to mere temper flare, or senseless acts of violence. And the African immigrants dragging their feeble bodies over barbed wire fences in Spain aren't risking their lives just because the grass is greener on the other side. Disintegrated economic development, exclusionary housing policy, inacessible real estate markets, insufficient job creation, and a pervasive lack of economic development collaboration between the two worlds is now regarded as much a force of eviction as the worst environmental disasters, or brutal tribal wars.

In terms of a global immigration movement, I'm trying to understand how ambiguity in architecture plays out in these contexts, as both a strategy for maintaining strict economic control over certain demographics, while, also, offering a much needed place for protecting communities that have been uprooted by civil war, scattered by genocide, banished from their homeland, etc.. Such are the semantics of the 'refugee camp', f.e., which usually turns out to be as much a permanent prison in humanitarian disguise as a temporary transitional facility, (the detention center as stepping stone to asylum? I don't think so.). In all the ingenuity that goes into accomodating a culture of forced migration these constructs only reinforce it, and ultimately refugee camps just end up incapacitating communities more than helping them to rebuild. I guess I can't ignore the implications of such places essentially herding people around the globe like cattle. The antithesis of global urbanism, "refugee urbanism" is a dispersed carceral landscape defined by an urbanism deprivation, a nomadic vertigo, and the uncertainty of judicial status in constant flux. Until the richer nations truly invest in solving the root causes of the common refugee camp (because they're not going anywhere soon), or continues to find new ways of helping refugee communities turn them into catalysts for broader social change and infrastructural improvement, what will keep the regimes of indiscriminate eviction at bay?

These semi-porous detention centers are partly the mechanisms that manage the global flows of exploited labor, they are the product of the 'global factory boss' in cahoots with the 'global slumlord', coming together to flex their power along the fringes of a decentralized and disaster-plagued third world landscape, hovering in nomadic perpetuity. For millions of people, it's a life of torture and neglect, starved wandering, the zombification of urban migration. I can't help viewing all these places as some sort of autonomous transnational platform of networked walls and flexible urbanisms, secretly working together in frightening choreography of architecural unison. (almost like an animated gif of moving building parts: folding gates, collapsible walls, roving compounds, mobile bunkers, inflatable watchtowers, coils of barbed wire unraveling themselves, urban street armor ratcheting into place, solar fences sparking with electricity, the whole freakish thing flickering somewhere in between a power-drunken march, a mechanical ballet, or a stilted slow motion slither.). It is the empire's modular self-expanding fortress -- the nomadic fortress -- designed to round up and quarantine global poverty. An act of simultaneous landscape fortressization zipping up the modern world, making it impermeable to everywhere else. Altogether, this refugee urbanism is an epic architectural conceit that translates distant lines in the sand into a subtle systematic ghettoization of the world's floating populations.

While China's migrant patterns over decades of hyperurbanization has led to the floating populations of instant labor armies and millions of people evicted from rural areas, the term "floating populations" can now be expanded to include an entire strata of globally dispossessed people, taxonomies of exodus movements, new classes of global non-citizens suspended in political limbomania, culturally uprooted, dying for juridical recognition. These floating populations are the strewn objects of dislocated space, pawns in a much larger geopolitical strategy of forced migration and tactical real estate wars. Soon, we may all be the subjects of one type of eminent domain or another.

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know why you consider mass eviction a third world problem. Here in the state of Florida the legislature had made the value of mobile homes on leased land less then $3,000. even if you bought it yesterday for over $100,000. the mobile home park owner can sell the land out from under you to a developer and the developer owes you pennies on the dollar and you have no recourse. Every week in Florida a park closes and hundreds of people are forced from the homes they own with the willing comlicity of local government quick to pass new zoning to elimate the park from their local.

Well, because mass eviction is a third world problem. But, I am certainly not naive enough to think that it is only a third world problem. In fact, in the post I refer to plenty of scenarios here in the U.S.. I specifically mention in the first paragraph, "homeless shelters, mobile homes, convalescent homes (even), immigration stalls, etc. The problem is now truly globalized problem. For the third world, they see the walls rising higher, the refugee camps turning into prisons. For the first world, we see continuing rises in homelessness, immigration, environmental refugees, etc. In fact, if you read the very next post after this one, it is about the FEMA disaster and failed response to Katrina, the mass evictions of victims from hotels, and the sheer wasted resource of emergency housing right here in our own country. A couple of posts before that, I talked about the problems of theoretical detention centers being built here in the U.S. to accommodate a future exodus of any type of refugee, or enemy combatant, or political subversive, homeless population explosion. Read on and you will see I hardly think mass eviction is a third problem only. It is how it is disguised that has me most curious right now. andhwo it is bursitng at the seams of landscape all over the world.

I believe the first world is witnessing a complete third worldization of its own landscape, however, as a backlash to the whole spectrum of forced migration which is not world-specific. Forced migration which is instigated by first world labor policy, economic practices.

Also, I live here in an Francisco, probably one of the most highly-contested real estate climates in the country, with an extremely vicious housing debate, with consequences that have led to more mass evictions that i could ever imagine personally seeing in my life. This city was built on eviction. This country was built on forced migration and mass eviction. I am interested in the how the structures which enforce migration and eviction appear the same in both worlds, how similar a homeless shelter in NYC is to a refugee camp in Sudan. How Katrina victims now live in tent cities like the ones we see in Indonesia. The global complexions of the landscapes of eviction are taking over, how these structures facilitate the problem, how they are the direct result of the first world's exploits of the third. etc.

Thanks for reading though and for posting your comment. I am sure much of my writing needs serious clarification. in fact, this comment probably does, too.

I just read the article, and I just wanted to say you make some very eye-opening comparisons. I have long been concerned about the growing socioeconomic concerns in this country, and greatly appreciate the issues raised in your article.